A tidy month-end routine starts with three different questions: what care took place, what you billed, and what the client actually paid. Those answers may sit in different records. Treating them as the same number is how an unpaid invoice or cancelled visit slips through.
The Pet Sitter's invoicing tools and exports are included in the free product. They help you organise records; they do not collect payments, check your bank account or file a tax return.
1. Check the booking record
Review the bookings for the period. Confirm which care was completed, which dates changed and which requests were cancelled. Resolve unclear arrangements with the client before relying on the figures.
Keep an explanation of any agreed change in the booking conversation or your own records. Do not create a second booking merely to make a total look right. Work arranged elsewhere can be documented with a manual invoice for a client record, without inventing a platform booking.
2. Check payment against your own evidence
Compare the amounts with your bank, payment-provider or cash records. Only use Mark paid after you have confirmed receipt. An accepted booking, an emailed invoice and a paid invoice are different things.
The payment status in The Pet Sitter records what you entered. It does not independently verify settlement. Keep refunds, provider charges and other expenses in your own records as well; they are not automatically reconciled from an external account.
3. Review invoices before creating more
Open Earnings and check the invoice list. Completed bookings may already have generated an invoice when automatic invoicing is enabled. Look first so you do not bill the same care twice.
For other work, open the client record in Clients and use its invoice action. Check the recipient, currency, description, quantity and unit price before creating it. Select the paid option only for money already received. The confirmation tells you whether an email was sent; you can also open the printable invoice and use your browser's print or save-as-PDF function.
4. Download the right export
In Earnings, Accounting export lets you choose a start and end date and select Download CSV. It lists issued invoices by their issue date, with the tax details recorded when each invoice was issued. Date boundaries use UTC, which can matter for invoices issued near midnight.
This is different from the separate earnings CSV, which concerns bookings and recorded payment movements. Choose the file that answers the question your bookkeeper is asking. Keep different currencies separate; the accounting export does not convert them into one total.
If the selected range is too large, choose smaller consecutive ranges. The export refuses an oversized range rather than silently returning part of it. Keep the date range in each filename and open the file to check it before sharing.
5. Hand over context, not just a spreadsheet
Save the relevant invoices, payment evidence and notes about adjustments alongside the export. Ask your bookkeeper how they want exceptions and missing information identified. A tax field in an export is a record of what the invoice disclosed, not a decision about what you should declare.
The useful outcome is a set of records you can explain: this booking happened, this amount was billed, and this payment was checked. For the dashboard steps, use the payments and invoices guide. You can repeat the same routine next month without a subscription or a paid accounting-export allowance.